Day 5 in Pakistan: Visiting Rohtas Fort with an impromptu police escort

I ordered an InDrive to Lahore on my last evening in Islamabad, and although it was meant to arrive at eight o’clock, my driver only showed up a little before nine. Humza suggested that next time, I better just order an InDrive the moment I am ready to go. I did not take it as a good sign when, after a mere half an hour of driving, we stopped at a gas station for a coffee and cigarette break, but somehow my driver was still able to beat our estimated arrival on Google Maps by a considerable margin.

While I had set the day aside for undertaking the long journey from Islamabad to Lahore, the one non-negotiable activity I had planned for the day was a tour of Rohtas Fort. About a third of the way from Islamabad, the fort lies on the section of the Grand Trunk Road where the Himalayas descend into the Punjab Plain. It was established in 1541 by Sher Shah Suri (also known as Sher Khan) to help defend his newly gained territories in northern India from the return of Mughal Emperor Humayun. During his reign, Sher Shah Suri won everlasting fame for himself with his infrastructural works, administrative reforms, and patronage of the arts, but his dynasty was short-lived. A few years after Sher Khan died in 1545, Humayun conquered his way back into India with troops loaned to him by the Persians.

I found Rohtas Fort more extensive than I expected. Once we had entered its walls, a whole town stretched before us, pressing up against the old gates as though attempting to break out of these ancient confines. My driver took it upon himself to drive me from one section to another, stopping the car and allowing me to jump out and take pictures. At the main parking lot, which lay some distance into the interior of the fort, I asked whether he would like to join me on my tour. He did not seem particularly enthusiastic either way but decided to come along. Little did I know the bizarre succession of events that this decision would unleash.

At the Shah Chand Wali Gate, which opens into a small fortification within the fort itself, we were stopped by a policeman. When he asked to see my visa, I thought we were just engaging in an annoying but harmless display of bureaucratic diligence, but his conversation with my driver took a strangely long time. I excused myself to take a few pictures of the Raja Maan Singh Haveli and the surrounding battlements, and when I returned, the two were still talking. The policeman gestured towards the gate and told me I could enter, but when I turned around, I saw both he and my driver followed along.

As it turns out, a foreign tourist cannot simply rock up to Rohtas Fort in a taxi and walk around without proper accompaniment. Since my driver did not have a tourist licence, he could not be trusted to keep me from hurting myself or the monument, so the policeman had to stay with us for the entire tour. Neither of them seemed to find this unpleasant. In fact, they spent much of this time merrily chatting to each other. Every now and then, one of them would tell me an interesting fact about the fort or point out the way to go, but for the most part they stayed a few paces behind while I explored. Ironically, the policeman did not intervene at all when a goat I had thought friendly – and whom I patted on the head a few times – tried to eat my shirt.

At the end of the tour, the driver asked me for a thousand rupees to give the policeman for his “security services.” I was only too glad that the sum had been stated so explicitly: it had cost me much less dearly than I had predicted. We made a quick stop at the museum and drove a little farther to the gate on the other side of the city before resuming our journey to Lahore. On the way, my driver suggested that we eat at Mian G, a roadside restaurant he claimed was so famous that it was constantly besieged by tourists and Pakistani celebrities. I cannot attest to the veracity of this claim, but I can say that the food was good. Instead of eating at the fancy dining hall with its individual wooden chairs, we sat on a couch in the diner for drivers and shared some dhal and parathas.